Business Analyst Online Has Arrived in Australia (Part 1)

The release of Business Analyst Online in Australia this autumn signals easy access to custom site evaluation and market analysis. Business Analyst Online is a web-based solution providing detailed and insightful information about consumers and their spending habits as well as lifestyles. Business Analyst Online is a subscription-based solution similar to ArcGIS Online wherein users consume credits. You can see real-world examples of Business Analyst Online here.

Business Analyst Online helps users answer such questions as: “What is the local demographic profile surrounding my retail location(s)?”, “Where are there concentrations of my customer located?” or even “Where should I locate my next location?”.

Today we are going to take a look at Business Online and begin to explore some of the functionality as well as answer the question: “What is the local demographic profile surrounding my current retail locations?”

First we will need to switch the country to Australia in order to access Australian data.

Now that we are set-up to work with Australian data we can get to work. Today’s analysis will help us as a owner of a small clothing retail chain. Some of the stores are doing very well selling above expectations meanwhile some are underperforming. Business Anlayst Online will allow us to quickly and easily analyse the local customer profile around each location.

We will begin by importing our current retail locations from our local machine as a zipped shapefile.

Once we have imported our shop locations we can create spatial rings around these locations at designated distances and name them based on a field value. You can see there are .5, 1 and 3 kilometer rings around the locations below.

We can reports to understand who is nearby to each location broken down by each surrounding ring using the reports functionality. We will first run a standard report which will create a report in a .pdf format explaining the demographic profile around each location and within each individual ring around every location.

Alternatively we can use the comparison reports option for a more visual snapshot of each location and the corresponding surrounding rings. You can also download this information into excel for further analysis.

Stayed tuned, next we are going to learn how to identify new retail locations. In the meantime you can check out Business Analyst Online for free here!